Dragged Across Concrete (18)
Directed by S Craig Zahler
★★★★

THIS is two-and-a-half hours plus of grisly cinematic crime and punishment, a searing thriller whose ubiquitous blood-and-bullet-ridden nastiness makes Tarantino seem insipid by comparison.

Unlike the latter, however, writer-director S Craig Zahler modestly leaves his screen credit until the end and the same goes the same for hard-working stars Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughan. They give their all — and it’s often too much — as cops suspended without pay for eight weeks after being outed for a racially motivated arrest.

Are they downhearted? No, because the deceitful duo convert to no-holds-barred felons who take on a bunch of vicious bank robbers to beat them at their own game.

An increasingly bloody fusion of crime, racism and violent death ensues, driven fast enough to disguise the fact that Zahler’s screenplay often lacks sense — neither does the film’s title — leaving Gibson and Vaughan to overact like crazy to carry the show over its storyline potholes to its climactic shoot-out.

The duo deserve praise for delivering performances that, despite the overdone screenplay, hit as hard and often as the essentially dislikeable death-dealing characters they play.

They’re memorable, despite the essentially unpleasant dramatic context.

Alan Frank

Steel Country (15)
Directed by Simon Fellows
★★★

SET in Trump’s America, this offbeat murder-mystery thriller features one of the most idiosyncratic and fascinating lead characters, who reels you in with his steely and uncompromising outlook and determination.

Andrew Scott plays Donny, a binman in a sleepy former steel town in Pennsylvania, who decides to play detective when the six-year-old boy who would wave at him during his rounds turns up drowned in the local river.

Donny, a compulsive-obsessive who’s perhaps somewhere on the autistic spectrum, unlike the local police doggedly sets about discovering what happened to the youngster despite the dark and treacherous path it leads him down.

Scott gives a powerhouse performance as a loving single father with an enviable moral core who has clearly been let down by the system in what's a compelling and haunting thriller.

Maria Duarte

Loro (15)
Directed by Paul Sorrentino
★★★

THE OVERUSED phrase “based on a true story” all too often simply means “only the facts have been changed for better box office” and, of course, to avoid expensive legal prosecution.

Here, though, writer-director Paul Sorrentino makes it patently clear his lurid tale of sex, political chicanery and out-and-out self-indulgence is a fictional biopic in pursuit of major box-office returns.

It tells the story of the scandalous and “unseen” private life of Italy’s most infamous politician Silvio Berlusconi, with the billionaire over-played with infectious flamboyance by Toni Servillo.

He and a strong supporting cast deliver a no-holds-barred fantasy send-up of political shenanigans shortened from two films into one and, if you've got a few hours to spare, this gaudy and sexually explicit extravaganza might fill them adequately.

AF

Once Upon a Time in London
Directed by Simon Rumley
★★

THE RISE and legendary fall of a nationwide criminal empire which paved the way for the notorious Kray twins is charted for the first time in a crime drama which is all brutal violence over substance.

It follows Jack “Spot” Comer (Terry Stone) and his right-hand man Billy Hill (Leo Gregory) from the 1930s over the course of three decades as Comer takes over Soho and the London crime scene.

Meanwhile Hill, considered to be one of the first celebrity gangsters, slowly turns from student into master and boss of Britain's underworld.

Co-writer and director Simon Rumley's drama is a non-stop series of unrelenting vicious beatings, torture and killings with one victim having his face used as a dartboard by Mad Frankie Fraser (Roland Manookian).

It leaves you feeling battered and bruised but without any connection with characters who are neither likeable nor charismatic.

Their story is as gripping and compelling as the Krays’ but this film doesn’t do justice to it.

MD

Greta (15)
Directed by Neil Jordan
★★★

ONCE upon a time filmgoers enjoyed two for the price of one — a major star-driven film and a minor “B” feature .

Those double-feature days are long gone. Instead trivial product which might have qualified as a B film are passed off as major works.

Such is the case with Neil Jordan’s competently made but largely predictable chiller. It has an unpersuasive Chloe Grace Moretz as Frances who, finding a handbag on the New York subway, enters the portals of personal hell after she returns the bag to eccentric French piano teacher Greta, played with just a tad too much theatrical gusto by Isabelle Huppert.

The subsequent stalker-and-shock film shenanigans offer little new in genre terms. Yet Jordan (co-writing with Ray Wright) does a slick enough job and makes effective use of New York locations to decorate the increasingly predicable affair.

And, sensibly, he lets Huppert steal what’s a pretty stereotypical show.

AF